His Eminence, Ross Cardinal Douthat, Cardinal-Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Oblivioustan, is back with another sermon aimed at the ladies who have ladyparts, and who do not use their ladyparts as God and His Eminence intended) to their full snowflake-Jesus-baby-making capacities. Having dismissed the dystopian effects on women's health as a mere possibility, and having trotted out the European fakery that ignores the fact that you can get the government to pay for your abortions in most of those places, and having hilariously used the recent experience of Ireland (!) as an example of how women's health and reproductive issues should be handled, His Eminence gets right down to it as to the fact that there is nothing to worry about here, because a woman's right to privacy exists only for those who can afford it.

But that actually makes the comparison to Texas more apt - because even if abortion were somehow banned outright in Texas tomorrow, it would still be available to women with the resources to travel out of state.

It is here where it becomes necessary to point out, again, that the right to choose is a constitutional right hallowed by the only controlling Supreme Court decision that is relevant. (Also, by that decision's criteria, an abortion at 20 weeks, which is what Texas and other states now choose to ban, is not a "late-term" abortion. That is a ruse by fakers, like His Eminence here.) The exercise of that right should not be blithely circumscribed by the economic circumstances of the woman choosing to exercise it. (Which is not the case in many of the European countries that Douthat finds so useful earlier in the column.) As a corrective to this mendacity, Kurt Eichenwald, on the ground in Texas, explains in personal terms what this draconian new law means to the lives of actual women, whose health matters not a damn to their state legislatures or, arguably, to His Eminence.